My adventures as an unrealistically muscular Angry Cat Man continue, as depicted by reader Pliny the in Between on the website Evolving Perspectives. I give you “Super Felid Vision Among the Stacks“. You might recognize my masked adversary.
Click to enlarge; you might want to see the titles:
That’s some funny shit.
It even happens on a T-shirt!
My fave, “Oprah Hears a Woo”
Funny because it’s true. Well…not so much funny as…depressing. Speaking of the titles, surely “Quantum Bullshit” should be by Chopra, not Plantinga?
My guess as to the masked bullshitter’s identity: John Haught.
An actual book that I have read:
On Bullshit by Harry G. Frankfurt
It’s a good book. And his book On Truth is worth reading also.
@Pliny: Neither here nor there, but I like cubes for books. I used to have a cubes-for-books shelving system myself, though (fortunately) mine were not filled with the same class of literature as above 🙂
Fantastic! Reminds me of walking through ostensibly educated family libraries of protestant Christians in America…with books entitled:
“Who is this Jesus guy?”
“What does being a Modern Day Christian Mean”
“Find Your Meaning through the New Christ”
“Christianity 2.0”
“Reinvent your Beliefs on the Internet”
And until I have read the rubbish, apparently, dialogue is forbidden.
Someone needs to make a movie with Angry Cat Man in it. Really.
I would love to have a tee shirt with Angry Cat Man’s logo on it. If Pliny was okay with it I could re-create the design and make it available for purchase through Zazzle. I do not want to make money on this, so hopefully this can be done for cost. Basically, I just want the tee to go with my Batman, Superman, Captain America, DareDevil, Spiderman, and Iron Fist tees.
No problem at all. Get me an email address and I’ll send you the art file
I’m going to go ahead and give it here. The Notification window, usually accessible with the word balloon icon, hasn’t been working for awhile. I had to manually go back to this comment thread to see if you might’ve replied. My address is gunnerkee19@gmail.com
Thank you.
I’ve been trying to give up on reading philosophy of religion for years. Every time I try, I realise just how much nonsensical crap is stated on no evidential basis, yet I keep being drawn in. People have made massive logical edifices out of applying personal reasoning to metaphysical puzzles, and their dissection philosophically seems an utter waste against the sheer absurdity of it all.
At the moment, I’m re-reading Herman Philipse’s God In The Age Of Science, and every time he references Swinburne’s bare assertions about what God personally intends (and thus trying to establish a “scientific” theory of God) I cringe. Yet I have that nagging feeling that if I don’t indulge this bullshit exercise, then I’m being anti-intellectual.
—
That said, it seems to me worth reading through some PoR and seeing what the arguments actually are (and what they are not). After all the criticism for The God Delusion not taking on the best arguments (and it’s a fair criticism – if you’re going to attack a subject, you shouldn’t attack a weak version of it), the best arguments aren’t really much better nor do they demonstrate anything remotely like what theists claim of God.
This seems like a good place to reiterate a should-be-better-known quote by a certain retired professor and/or his alter ego, Angry Cat Man (sourced here):
“HOW DO YOU KNOW THAT?”
That’s the question you should always ask believers when they make an unsupported assertions, ranging from “God is loving” to “Our souls live on after death.” The answer will always be one of two things: “The Bible says so,” or “I just know it to be true.” Neither of those are rational answers, but they satisfy the religious.
It is in fact the “how-do-you-know-that” query that really distinguishes New Atheism from Old. While atheists have always decried the lack of evidence for theism, it is the infusion of scientists and science-friendly people into atheism, starting with Carl Sagan and continuing on to Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris, Pinker, and Dennett, that has made us realize that religious dogmas are in fact hypotheses, and you need reasons and evidence for accepting them. If you have none, then you have no reason to believe in God.
Nevertheless, religious dogma does change, but not because theology has found better reasons. It’s because a.) science has shown the dogma to be false (Genesis, Adam and Eve, creation, the Exodus, etc.) or b.) secular morality has shown that the tenets of religious belief are no longer supportable (hell as a place of fire, limbo, discrimination against gays, the Mormons’ refusal to let blacks be priests, etc.)
The sophisticated theological (i.e. obscurantist) answer would be that it follows from God’s necessary traits, or that the necessary traits underpin the reality of private revelation. Hence the need to dig into PoR – there’s so much to untangle in the justifications that there’s always some “retreat” the theist can do to get out of any charge an atheist throws at God.
To which the atheist’s response would be, “HOW DO YOU KNOW THAT?”
There’s no evidence for religion; if there were, we’d have heard about it by now. As a result, their entire epistemological system rests on either (1) feelings, which reduce to personal psychology (“I rilly, rilly believe it”)–but a belief, no matter how strongly held, does not correspond to any particular external, objective reality; and/or (2) some external religious source (“The bible tells me so”); I hardly need to refute that here.
The more the sophisticated theologian distances himself from historical christianity (or fill in the religion of your choice here), the *more* force the “HOW DO YOU KNOW THAT?” question obtains. The Nicene creed is one thing. When John Haught says “Only an independent cosmos could dialogue or be truly intimate with God. From this point of view, therefore, the epic of evolution is the story of the emerging independence and autonomy of a world awakening in the presence of God’s grace,” the question “HOW DO YOU KNOW THAT?” blows him right out of the water.
And, if the religionist chooses to retreat and not answer the question, then we have no reason to take seriously what he says. Cue Hitchens.
I like the cut of your jib. Also, that jibe.
It needs to be spread far and wide.
I don’t think it does – as it’s like appealing to the definition of a triangle being 3 sides. Asking “how do you know that a triangle has three sides?” is not only nonsensical, but a fundamental misreading of the statement at hand.
This is not to say a theologian could be vindicated in this approach, but merely that the skeptical regress has limited value when assessing the validity of any claim.
“Yet I have that nagging feeling that if I don’t indulge this bullshit exercise, then I’m being anti-intellectual.”
Don’t! Don’t feel that. If you read all the bullshit in order to confirm that it is, indeed, nonsense then you will have wasted your life reading rubbish that you don’t like and which does you no good.
I think you’re entitled to demand that the opposition produce their best arguments upfront. If you don’t find them convincing, there’s no obligation to wade through the rest.
When I was at university, an acquaintance urged me to read the Bible (which I flatly refused, and thereafter avoided him). As I told him, I’d heard enough in Sunday School (to convince me that Christianity was nonsense – which I was too polite to say), why would more of the same make any difference. And (as I also didn’t say) I had more pleasurable things to do with my time. I was a polite little bugger then.
cr
The general trouble is that while In happy to dismiss revealed theology that way, there are plenty of smart and learned people who see the legitimacy of PoR despite being atheists of a similar sort to myself. In perfectly happy to leave theology to the theologians, but the fundamental nature of the debate over God’s existence is something I can’t reasonably cast aside on those same grounds.
The parallel would be like a creationist dismissing evolution without reference to the science of the matter. PoR is the intellectual approach to those questions, thus should have at least some consideration. Indeed, I didn’t realise just how poor the case was until I saw how theists tried to cobble it all together.
There *is* some good philosophy of religion. However, most of it in my experience is by non-believers. For example, the Zalta-Oppenheimer computer assisted proof of the ontological argument is very interesting (though as mentioned, is not convincing). One of them is a believer, the other not, though. Patrick Grim’s argument against omniscience is novel (but of course the believers, including Plantinga, who have addressed it, don’t get it). Grunbaum’s patient refutation of bad cosmology on the part of theists also counts. Notice a pattern? 😉
Additions to my ‘must read’ list:
‘We Invented Science and Other Blunders’
‘Even Bullshit Has a First Cause’
Chris G
I notice a sad lack of titles by the Deepak there. I would have thought they were essential to any collection of bovinely enhanced agricultural nutrient application.
cr
I think bullshit is the First Cause. It sure as hell isn’t contingent in any sophisticated theology I’ve read, so it must be necessary. By definition, any necessary being must be God. Ergo, God is bullshit.
Q.E.D.
Mark Joseph said:
““HOW DO YOU KNOW THAT?”
That’s the question you should always ask believers when they make an unsupported assertions, ranging from “God is loving” to “Our souls live on after death.””
The problem with that is that many of them will have an answer. Guys like William Lane Craig could chew your ear off with ever more complex and convoluted justifications for anything they say. They’ve had 2000 years to come up with answers. Its not like they’ve been doing anything productive in all that time, they’ve just been creating this labyrinth of arguments.
I may have been too prolix (wouldn’t be the first time 😉 ) up above at #7, but what I was trying to say is, yes, they can give responses (I won’t dignify them with the term “answers”), but these, lacking evidence that would convince the reasonable, educated mind, invariably fall into one of two categories, the psychological or the revelational.
Do our apologist friends not know about random sampling? 😉 One can get good data about a population when sampling is well done.
Man, like, Western Civilization like sucks man, like all those people who thought for thousands of years were all like, totally stupid, and like, Science man, except like math, cause that’s kind of hard, and its probably bullshit too, cause, I don’t like understand it. Like, cause if you think about it, without having math first, you wouldn’t have science at all, and so, like, it can’t be scientific so its like stupid.
Like, all that exists is what I experience, and like stupid people like that Einstein creep pointed out that like “what-I-experience” in contrast to “what-I-don’t-experience” can’t be decided based on “what-I-experience”–and that’s like why Einstein was stupid, besides all his stupid talk about God, even though he didn’t believe in God, cause he was like a scientist and stuff. . .